Tyson Ashley Retz
Associate Professor
Contact
Telephone: 51833021
Email: tyson.retz@uis.no
Location: HG O-237
Department
Faculty of Arts and Education
Department of Cultural Studies and Languages
About me
Tyson Retz is an intellectual historian and philosopher of history with a PhD from the University of Melbourne (2016). His first book Empathy and History (Berghahn 2018) explains the role that the concept of empathy played in providing history with a philosophical foundation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Critical of the psychologism of that tradition, the book develops an alternative to 'empathetic understanding' based on Gadamer’s hermeneutical reception of Collingwood’s logic of question and answer.
His second book Progress and the Scale of History appears in the Cambridge Elements series Historical Theory and Practice. The Element explores the idea of progress within different conceptions of history from antiquity to the present day. Retz is also the author of numerous peer-reviewed articles that share a concern with the philosophical foundations of different conceptions of history. He is currently an editor of the Bloomsbury History: Theory and Method digital resource, and he sits on the board of the History Education Research Journal.
Currently, Retz is pursuing two separate projects in French intellectual history. The first considers the ways in which Catholic historians during the Restoration (1815-1830) attempted to write away the achievements of the Revolution, providing new insights into the religious foundations of historical culture and writing, as well as their political implications. The second project examines twentieth-century existentialism and the conceptions of history that played host to conflicts between freedom and necessity. Other recent work includes a history of European liberalism from 1789 to 1947.
Visiting appointments have taken him to the University of British Columbia (2014), Tallinn University (2018) and the University of Oslo (2021). In 2024-25, he is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Vienna.
PhD supervisions: Jacob Tom (2021-24), 'Radical Moderation: Time and History in Twentieth-Century Norwegian Literature'.
Peer-reviewed scholarly works:
Books
- Progress and the Scale of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022.
- Empathy and History: Historical Understanding in Re-enactment, Hermeneutics and Education. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2018. In paperback in 2022 with a foreword by Allan Megill.
Articles / chapters
- 'The Past in Question: History as Past and Present Problem-Spaces', Journal of the Philosophy of History 18, 2 (2024), 213-22.
- 'Idea or Concept? Progress in Comparative Methodological Perspective', Journal of the Philosophy of History 17, 3 (2023), 452-71.
- 'Teaching History on the Scale of the Anthropocene: Three Ethical Challenges', Historical Encounters 9, 2 (2022), 7-17.
- ‘Progress’, in Bloomsbury History: Theory and Method, eds Stefan Berger, Berber Bevernage, Maria Grever, Tracey Loughran, Tyson Retz, Edward Wang and Ogechukwu Williams. London: Bloomsbury, 2021.
- 'Inside Historical Re-enactment', in Historical Re-enactment: New Ways of Experiencing History, eds Mario Carretero, Brady Wagoner and Everado Perez-Manjarrez, 185-201. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2022.
- ‘Didactics’, in Routledge Companion to Historical Theory, ed. Chiel van den Akker, 414-29. London: Routledge, 2022.
- 'The Open Future in Peril: the Anthropocene and the Political Agent of Humanistically Oriented Historiography', Rethinking History 25, 4 (2021), 440-57.
- ‘Empathy’, in Bloomsbury History: Theory and Method, eds Stefan Berger, Berber Bevernage, Maria Grever, Tracey Loughran, Edward Wang and Ogechukwu Williams. London: Bloomsbury, 2021.
- ‘Teaching Empathy and the Critical Examination of Historical Evidence’, in Historical Thinking for History Teachers, eds Tim Allender, Anna Clark and Robert Parkes, 89–101. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2019.
- and Stuart Macintyre, ‘The Honours Conception of History’, History Australia 15, 4 (2018), 804–22.
- ‘Why Re-enactment is not Empathy, Once and for All’, Journal of the Philosophy of History 11, 4 (2017), 606–23.
- ‘The Structure of Historical Inquiry’, Educational Philosophy and Theory 49, 6 (2017), 606–17.
- ‘At the Interface: Academic History, School History and the Philosophy of History’, Journal of Curriculum Studies 48, 4 (2016), 503–17.
- ‘History, the Philosophy of History and History Education’, Agora (Sungraphô) 50, 1 (2015), 4–11.
- ‘A Moderate Hermeneutical Approach to Empathy in History Education’, Educational Philosophy and Theory 47, 3 (2015), 214–26.
Edited works:
- Bloomsbury History: Theory and Method (digital resource), section editor "Historiography, Theory and Method"
- guest editor, Educational Philosophy and Theory 49, 6 (2017), history education special issue. See also the introduction.
Other articles:
- ‘Historical Reenactment: Limitations and Possibilities’, Fortid 17, 2 (2020), 38–41.
- ‘Limitaciones y posibilidades de la reconstrucción histórica’, Íber. Didáctica de las Ciencias Sociales, Geografía e Historia 97 (2019), 35–40.
- ‘Against Empathy in History?’ Public History Weekly 6 (2018), 27.
- ‘Doing Historical Empathy’, Agora 47, 3 (2012), 40–46.
Reviews and commentary:
- ‘Tolstoy’s Anthropocene’, commentary on Zoltán Boldizsár Simon, ‘The Role of History in an Anthropocenic Knowledge Regime’, Public History Weekly 9 (2021), 1.
- Review of Michael J. Kelly and Arthur Rose (eds), Theories of History: History Read across the Humanities. London: Bloomsbury, 2018. Journal of Cognitive Historiography 5, 1–2 (2018–19). 4 pp.
- Review of Georgios Patios, Kierkegaard on the Philosophy of History. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. International Network for Theory of History.
Media and interviews:
- ‘The Question of Scale in History and History Education’, #PastFwd provocation, 13 November 2020.
- I Bokhylla – ‘Theories of History’, Fortid 16, 4 (2019), p. 112-113
- ‘How Empathy Can Help Students Grasp Past and Present’, Alpha Galileo, 12 March 2019.
- Emerging Historians Q&A – Tyson Retz. Australian Historical Association.